BAJURA, NEPAL -- It has been three months since Kandhara Rokaya has eaten rice, the staple meal of people in Nepal. She received 1 kilogram of rice from her neighbors three months ago, but that was only enough to feed her family for two days. Today, Rokaya says her only option is to feed her four children dhedo, traditional dough made from boiled flour.
Rokaya is frustrated. Her family is hungry. But it is not because they are poor.
“We don’t get rice here no matter how much money we have,” says Kandhara, a resident of Nepal's remote far-western district of Bajura, nearly 600 miles from Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital city.
In order to prepare for the holy Hindu festival of Dashain in October, Rokaya says two of her neighbors made the two-day hike to the only food depot near their village. Each woman gave her half a kilogram of rice so she could celebrate Dashain with her family.
“On the two days of the festival, our family feasted on rice," she says, recalling the recent memory with a smile.
The rice in Parbati Rokaya's pantry ran out after the festival too. She also lives in Bajura and says there is a scarcity of food here year-round. In districts throughout Western Nepal food insecurity has become increasingly common and alarming.
People in the neighboring district of Bajhang say they too went without rice this festival season. Jaya Bahadur Shahi of Rugin of Bajhang says she and her seven children ate only millet bread during the recent Tihar festival. And on a daily basis, things are worse. She says she made the long journey to the food depot two months ago, but the food she was able to get was gone in a week.
“We don't have even a single rice grain left now,” Shahi says.
Birendra Shahi says he was furious when he made the long journey to the food depot, only to have to turn back empty handed. Officials at the depot told his there was not food to be had.
“I had gone to the depot with hope, but returned with despair,” he says. "We have been told that Nepal is self-reliant on rice, but villagers here fill their belly with rice hardly a month in a year."
Shahi says he is lucky if his children eat two small meals a day.
“I don’t know [how] we will fill our bellies in the days to come,” says Jayamal Bohara of Bajura. Villagers living in the Mugu, Humla and Kalikot, Bajura, Bahjang and other western districts struggle with the same question – how can they survive when no food comes to the west?
The weather and land in the western regions of the Nepal do not support growing rice crops. Villagers throughout the area depend on the government run food depots to supply rice from other regions, but over the last year supply has fallen far short of demand. Food depots rely on helicopters to deliver rice and other staples because of the high altitude and the fact that much of the western region has a limited network of roads.
According to the World Population Foundation, WPF, more than 75 percent of the in the western region of Nepal face “acute food insecurity.” WPF estimates that more than 3.6 million people in the western and mountain districts have insecure access to food each year. Last year, conditions worsened thanks to both a drought and heavy snow and hailstorms throughout the country.
For residents like Shahi and Rokaya, the rice shortage is frustrating because it cannot be addressed at the local level since Nepal’s western districts are not self-reliant when it comes to food production, says Yogendra Prasad Pandey, chief district officer of Bajura. “If these high, hilly areas [were] self-sufficient in food production, people would never have to face rice shortage,” Pandey says.
Dipak Lamsal, chief of the far-western regional office of Nepal Food Corporation, NFC, the state-owned agency responsible for rice distribution in the far-western region, says districts here have to rely on rice supplied from outside the region for at least eight months of the year. And even then, Lamsal notes that quantities are severely limited. Lamsal says that Pandey’s estimate of just eight months of food shortages is incorrect. The NFC released a statement acknowledging a “year-round food shortage in the far-west region of Nepal.
"Rice is always in high demand here,” Lamsal says. “We are not able to meet the demand.”
Lamsal says the climate here is the primary problem when it comes to sustaining food. “Crops do not grow well, as it snows during the winter and a dry spell persists during the summer. Paddy, wheat and maize, all used as meal staples, do not grow here,” Lamsal says. Potato, buckwheat and millet do grow here, but in small quantities that are not enough to sustain the population.
“Some people even live on leaves of nettle and wild fruits and roots to fill their stomachs,” Lamsal says. “But even the nettle plants wither due to drought.”
With rainfall below normal standards for since 2008, crops throughout the country have been reduced. At the Martadi food depot in western Nepal, residents are feeling the brunt of that shortage. Lamsal says there is a current demand for 20,000 quintals, or two million kilograms of rice in the region.
“We are planning to send 5,000 quintals,” Lamsal says. The delivery of rice will satisfy just one quarter of the total need in the region. And the quantity is expected to last for only several weeks.
But the state-owned food corporation has been saying this for years, complains Satya Pahadi, a lawmaker from Dolpa, a district to the east of Bajura, who represents Nepal’s biggest party, Unified Communist Party of Nepal, Maoist.
“The Food Corporation keeps on saying, ‘We are soon supplying rice,’” says Pahadi. “But what it does is create a food shortage. NFC alone cannot satiate the hunger of western Nepal,” he says, adding that the situation has never been more serious.
“The leaders and high-level government officials who sit in the capital don’t know the real problem of the people living in the country’s corners,” Pahadi says.
Pahadi says he understands that securing rice is largely out of his hands. He says the NFC gets food from the federal government in Kathmandu thanks to donations from the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, World Food Organization and the United Nationals Development Program. The donated food is then combined with rice grown in Nepal and divided into the districts to go to national food depots. Once the rice reaches the NFC, the rice is divided again between 11 village development committees and localities.
“No matter how many food depots are there, rice shortage is a perennial problem in the far-west,” Dayaram Pandit, a Bajhang-based journalist, says.
Under the food distribution provision, the NFC is supposed to provide about 10 pounds of subsidized rice to each family per year. But as soon as food arrives in the depots, Lamsal says residents pour in and often take more than their share, leaving many others without the proper allotment of food. In one food depot in Kolti, in the western district, the depot has been empty since September.
“We had supplied 3,700 quintals (370,000 kilograms) of rice earlier this year, but it hardly lasted for a week,” Lamsal says. “The depot has no rice stock now.”
Lamsal admits that he does not know when the next delivery will be come to food depots in the western region.
“I don’t have [a] clear idea when the depot will receive rice again,” Lamsal says.
But because the western districts are the most difficult to reach, the supply of rice that reaches the area is increasingly irregular. The majority of towns and villages here are still outside the national road network, which means the only way to get food supply deliveries is via air transportation. The NFC leases helicopters from private airlines to charter rice, but Lamsal says the charter flights are irregular.
“Chance of rice delivery is always 50-50, given the geographical remoteness and weather condition in these districts,” Lamsal says. “Many times flights are canceled, and on the other hand, helicopters don’t come on time. They remain busy in ferrying tourists.”
Locals say that they wouldn’t face rice shortage if roads were constructed. “While roads are under construction in some districts, many others may not have roads even within the next 10 years,” Pandit, the local journalist, says.
In the meantime, Rokaya and Shahi say they will continue to do their best to feed their families with dhedo and foraged food. But Rokaya says that in Nepal’s quest for democracy and increased services to the people, she expected change to come much faster.